


Fryer Grease and Tennessee Whiskey

by GoldenClover



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 03:08:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8828095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenClover/pseuds/GoldenClover
Summary: The wind ruffles your hair. Somewhere, you can hear the crunch of bare feet on twigs. Your hand itches for a gun, a knife, a cigarette. Probably a Jap coming to decorate the bayou with your brains, because they’ve followed you home. You know they have.





	

The wind ruffles your hair. Somewhere, you can hear the crunch of bare feet on twigs. Your hand itches for a gun, a knife, a cigarette. Probably a Jap coming to decorate the bayou with your brains, because they’ve followed you home. You know they have. They’ve come to kill you, you were never meant to survive that war; the hunter doesn’t lose his prey so easy.

You’re so skinny, Merri. What’ve the Marines been feeding you? Why are you so quiet? Merri? Merri, are you listening to me?

  
They talk to you like you’re still listening, like Merri’s still in there. They don’t know that you can’t respond, that you can’t speak for a dead man. You don’t think they’d like Snafu though.

Your hands are cracked, blistered. Dirt cakes your fingernails, but in the right light, it looks like blood. You don’t miss the war, not really. But you ain’t jumping in joy at coming home. Maybe you oughta get an apartment down in New Orleans, go somewhere where nobody knows Merri, nobody knows Snafu. Where nobody knows you at all.

  
You come home at night with splinters in your palms, with wood dust scattered across your bare shoulders. You come home tired and worn, and you come home with sunshine draped around you like a cloak. The house always smells of something nice, your mama is always bustling around like she did this back when you were a kid. Like she’s always done this.

You know better though. You still remember nights of your mama passed out at the dining room table with your daddy’s Jack Daniels. You still remember stealing a sip when you were seven, the way it burned your throat and set fire to your tongue. She hadn’t even woken up.

You meet a man in a bar one night. Dark hair, darker eyes. Calls himself Roe, he tells you that all quiet and solemn.

He buys you a drink, you buy him a drink. You talk about everything and nothing. You think maybe you saw him once before the war, but he’d had lighter eyes then. And he didn’t drink so much. He was in the army, you were in the marines. But you respect him, it’s hard not to respect the medics. Your respect doesn’t come easy, and when you tell him that, he only laughs.

It’s the sad kind though. The kind you know all too well.

The bar stinks of frying grease and Tennessee whiskey. There’s cigarette smoke everywhere. Roe tells you about a man with red hair and dark eyes, you tell him about a man with red hair and dark eyes. When you’re done talking, he stands up, a little unsteady. Guess I’ll see you around, Shelton.

Shelton. You think about the day you baptised Sledge with a name. You can’t be Merri anymore, you can’t be Snafu, so you’ll wear Shelton like a third skin. You don’t see Roe around though, of course you don’t. History always repeats itself, and you’ve never been much good at keeping people named Eugene. You don’t think you’d want Roe though.

The apartment is dank, chilly. Bugs hover around the window, there’s just one bare mattress on the floor. You’re not proud of it, but you are. It’s your apartment, your own apartment in the veins of New Orleans. Here, you can be anybody you want - Snafu, Merri, Shelton. No one gives a shit here.

But you sit in the cobwebbed window and smoke, and you think about a man with red hair and dark eyes who calls you Snafu. You wonder what he would’ve thought of Merri. Doesn’t matter though. He might as well be another of the thousands of dead.

You’re still waiting for the Japs to kill you.


End file.
